Alma Thomas’s A Bed of Red Azaleas (1968) thrums with a distinctive visual cadence, translating the rhythms of nature through abbreviated strokes of vermilion and peripheral hues of cyan, pink and cadmium. Inspired by the flowers in the artist’s garden and those local to her home in Washington, DC, Thomas’s luminous homage to nature demonstrates her ability to build ebullient worlds from a humble visual vocabulary. Painted four years before her landmark show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1972 – where she became the first African American woman to hold a solo exhibition in the museum’s history – the work anticipates the height of Thomas’s mature period, defined by tessellated compositions and increasingly structured, architectural geometries of colour. A Bed of Red Azaleas, by contrast, preserves a more organic patterning, one that expresses the artist’s intimate rapport with her subject.

Embarking on her artistic career in her late 60s, Thomas rapidly ascended to prominence within the Washington art scene. Her exhibition at the Whitney brought her national acclaim and, in the years that followed, she mounted more solo shows than nearly any other woman artist of the period. Thomas resided in the same house on Fifteenth Street in Washington, DC, for over seven decades, producing many of her most iconic paintings from her kitchen studio overlooking her garden, where she grew azaleas alongside peonies, hydrangeas and dahlias. Thomas’s garden is well documented in photographs from the 1950s to the 1970s, which capture its diverse and abundant flora in full, vibrant bloom, spilling over fences, pathways and providing the backdrop for a sculptural bust of the Greek god, Pan.

This sense of abundance finds expression in Thomas’s abstract painterly studies, where the atmospheric effects of colour and kinetic properties of light emerge as central subjects. Tessellated daubs of paint appear to both rise from and recede into the painting surface, possessing an elemental rhythm that attunes itself to the macrocosmic patterning of the natural world. Meanwhile, interstitial spaces of white substrate – areas the artist likened to sunlight filtering through foliage – evoke what photojournalist Ida Jervis described in 1971 as the gentle intrusion of Thomas’s surrounding urban environment. ‘The life of the street beyond filters through the spaces between the leaves […], and passing trucks and taxis add their flashes of bright reds and yellows. Muffled street sounds are softly, faintly heard as well as work sounds from her neighbor’s garage across 15th street, and the musical voices of children’ (‘Magic Windows of Alma Thomas’, 1971, reproduced in Alma Thomas, exh. cat., The Studio Museum in Harlem, Prestel, London, 2016, p.221).

Though Washington, DC, was her lifelong place of residence as an adult, Thomas’s early years were spent in the Deep South, in a segregated neighbourhood of Columbus, Georgia, where she lived with her parents and three sisters. In 1906, at the age of 15, escalating racial violence compelled the family to uproot their life and relocate to the nation’s capital – a city that would later emerge as a hub for civil rights activism in the 1960s. While politics rarely surfaced explicitly in Thomas’s artistic practice, her commitment to exuberant abstraction and beauty – encapsulated in her mantra, ‘I’ve never bothered painting the ugly things in life’ (quoted in Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1979, p.194) – reveals a quiet, subtextual resistance, responsive to the politicised contours of her lived experience and the social realities of her time.

Drawing parallels to Thomas’s own journey of relocation, hybrid azaleas – native to the South – were cultivated at the National Arboretum, located just a short distance from her home in Washington, DC. Thomas would visit frequently, gathering what she described as ‘impressions’ of the flowers – observations that would later inspire her painterly studies of colour, reinterpreted from memory in her studio. Azaleas also serve as a conceptual motif in Thomas’s monumental triptych, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976), which the artist bequeathed to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Migrating across the three panels, irregular forms in scarlet vie for prominence against the negative spaces of the white ground, culminating in a heightened, syncopated composition that reflects the influence of jazz culture on Thomas’s work. Curator Erin Jenoa Gilbert identifies a personified resonance within this animated exchange, observing how borders are traversed ‘from the densely populated left side of the painting, where color is segregated, to the right side of the canvas, where the forms are desegregated’ (‘Seeing Red: Romance, Rage, and Resurrection’, in Alma Thomas: Resurrection, exh. cat., Mnuchin Gallery, New York, 2019, p.22).

Colour served as the vital scaffolding for Thomas’s compositions throughout her artistic career. In 1977, she cited Paul Cézanne’s The Garden at Les Lauves (Le Jardin des Lauves) (c.1906), which she had seen at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, as inspiring her to use colour as an ‘architectural structure’. The museum had acquired the painting in 1955, having a traceable impact on the Washington art scene. Thomas described Cézanne’s ‘unfinished’ painting in a manner that recalls the ‘allover’ approach championed by the Abstract Expressionists (quoted in Alma Thomas, exh. cat., The Studio Museum in Harlem, Prestel, London, 2016, p.224).

A Bed of Red Azaleas unites the Post-Impressionist endeavour to distil the atmospheric quality of a landscape with the vigour achieved through the gestural brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism. By 1968, Thomas had transitioned from oil to acrylic, embracing the medium’s properties to temper colour. While her work shared affinities with the local Washington Color School – a movement that included figures such as Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam and Morris Louis – in its celebration of bold, saturated pigments, Thomas diverged in her technique. Rather than staining the canvas in a manner characteristic of the movement, she worked on prepared ground, constructing her images through layered and deliberate mark-making. Situating Thomas within the historically white-male-dominated arena of Abstract Expressionism highlights her singular achievement: a synthesis of liberated intuition and purposeful design that resisted the impositions of the genre’s territorial and aesthetic parameters.